Research Scientist / Research Engineer, Automated Safety

Lila Sciences, Inc.; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 298,000; Full time

Job summary

Lila Sciences is assembling a Safety AI team in Cambridge, MA, London, and San Francisco to develop tests and tools that evaluate safety-relevant capabilities of scientific AI models and workflows. You will work on automated red-teaming, safeguards, and evaluation infrastructure to advance responsible autonomy in scientific AI systems.

The role spans Research Scientist and Research Engineer profiles, focusing on empirical methods, reproducible experiments, and collaboration with domain experts

Qualifications

• Strong empirical judgment, practical programming ability, and experience with modern AI systems.
• Ability to investigate ambiguous failures, design informative comparisons and communicate limitations clearly.
• An interest in scientific misuse risks and the ability to collaborate productively with domain specialists.
• For the Research Scientist profile: evidence of selecting valuable research questions and prototyping ideas.
• For the Research Engineer profile: evidence of building reliable research software and evaluation infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Develop and run capability evaluations of scientific models, agents and tool-mediated workflows.
• Create methods or systems that explore diverse failure modes and adapt tests as evidence emerges.
• Build reproducible experiments and evaluation tools with evidence capturing outcomes.
• Measure the quality and coverage of automated assessments, including failure cases in evaluators.
• Develop broader safety automation across threat model management and monitoring workflows.
• Collaborate with risk researchers and mitigation engineers to translate findings into safeguards.

Skills

Empirical judgment

Programming

AI systems

Experiment design

Communication

Collaboration

Job description

Research Scientist / Research Engineer, Automated Safety

Cambridge, MA USA; London, UK; San Francisco, CA USA

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining the core scientific discovery capabilities of the stack. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, safety systems to mitigate risks, and a research agenda that explores longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

As scientific AI systems become more capable and autonomous, their safety assessment and safeguards must develop alongside them. At Lila Sciences, you will help build the research methods and tools that make this possible, so that more and more decision-enablers can be automated safely. This will move us closer to the vision of a safety and security apparatus that is robust to a fully autonomous scientific engine.

Your initial focus will be misuse: developing flexible and automated red-teaming approaches that test safety-relevant scientific capabilities and the robustness of safeguards. You will also contribute to safety automation beyond red teaming, helping the team evaluate, monitor and respond to risks across increasingly autonomous scientific workflows. You will own reusable research methods and assessment tools, working with mitigation engineers who implement protective mechanisms. We welcome Research Scientists and Research Engineers; responsibilities can span or evolve between the two profiles.

What You'll Be Building

• Develop and run capability evaluations of scientific models, agents and tool-mediated workflows (including simulated lab environments), working with domain experts to make tests scientifically meaningful.
• Create methods or systems that explore diverse failure modes, adapt tests as evidence emerges and support systematic investigation beyond fixed benchmarks.
• Build reproducible experiments and evaluation tools that capture relevant behavior, outcomes and the evidence needed to interpret findings.
• Measure the quality and coverage of automated assessments, including failure cases in the evaluators themselves.
• Develop broader safety automation, across threat model management, evidence triage, regression testing, monitoring workflows or tools that help researchers assess and respond to risks.
• Collaborate with risk researchers and mitigation engineers to translate findings into improved assessments and safeguards, and verify whether those changes work.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Strong empirical judgment, practical programming ability and experience working with modern AI systems.
• The ability to investigate ambiguous failures, design informative comparisons and communicate limitations clearly.
• An interest in scientific misuse risks and the ability to collaborate productively with domain specialists.
• For the Research Scientist profile: evidence of selecting valuable research questions, developing or adapting methods, and designing experiments that yield defensible conclusions. You should be able to prototype and test your ideas.
• For the Research Engineer profile: evidence of building reliable research software, evaluation infrastructure or agent systems that enable reproducible experiments and efficient iteration. You should be able to contribute to experimental design and interpretation.

Bonus Points For

• Automated red teaming, adversarial testing or evaluation-method research.
• Scientific AI, tool-using agents, laboratory automation or other complex environments.
• Experience with safety monitoring, model-based evaluators or scalable experimental infrastructure.

Compensation

We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.

U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees; and a company subsidized lunch program.

International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.

Expected Base Salary Range

$180,000 - $298,000 USD

About LILA

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.

LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.

Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.

Lila Sciences iscommitted to equal employment opportunityregardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy .

A Note to Agencies

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.